The present invention relates to a stencil printing machine with a plurality of drum units and a method of controlling the same.
A stencil printing machine with a plurality of drum units has been hitherto known. With such a stencil printing machine, as disclosed in the Japanese Patent No. 2911891, an area specified by a user and the other area can be separately printed by perforating separate stencil sheets by heat according to an image of the specified area and an image of the other area and then loading the perforated stencil sheets on respective drum units.
The style of separation that the user desires varies on originals. However, according to the configuration of the conventional stencil printing, the separation area is specified by causing the printing machine to scan a sheet in which the separation area is specified. Accordingly, the number of man hours for the separation process increases, and furthermore, when the sheet is contaminated, noise which is difficult to remove is added to an original image in some cases. Moreover, black letters and colored letters within the original cannot be separated unless the user specifies an area.
For two-color separation, it is possible to add various types of hardware elements such as a digitizer, a color scanner to recognize colors of originals, and an automatic two-color separation function to the machine. However, addition of the hardware elements to the machine increases costs of the stencil printing machine. Moreover, users tend to avoid a separation operation using a digitizer and a separation operation requiring specifying each color because the methods thereof are difficult to understand and the operations thereof are complicated.
The present invention was made to solve the aforementioned problem and an object of the present invention is to provide a stencil printing machine capable of executing a separation process that a user desires with an easy operation not making the user feel troublesome and the method of controlling the same.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a stencil printing machine capable of selectively executing various types of separation processes that the user desires and the method of controlling the same.